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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| No! Not when I just learned it! Not really sure why this is in Atlas Obscura, but I'll run with it. It Might Be Time to Update the Old ‘Alfa-Bravo-Charlie’ Spelling Alphabet  But it’s hard to break old habits. When someone on the phone—the doctor’s office, the bank, the credit card company—asks for my name, I always offer to spell it out—it’s a pretty uncommon surname. I've quit offering and just do it. This uses what is what’s called a “spelling alphabet,” or, confusingly, a “phonetic alphabet.” It is nearly impossible to distinguish, say, a B from a D, or an M from an N, without coming up with a word starting with one of those letters. But if you just pick one off the top of your head, you can make things worse. Like "B as in bed" gets heard as "so that's D as in dead?" That's why we have the standardized spelling alphabet. The British military came up with the first few examples, just for letters they found the most difficult: “P as in pip,” “B as in beer.” Yeah, the Puritanical Americans probably came up with something like "B as in boring." I can't complain too much, though; "Whiskey" is the official spelling word for W. A tremendous amount of research, time, and money was invested into figuring out the optimal spelling alphabet—at least for the three languages that the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, the United Nations agency that handles air transportation) felt significant enough to have one (English, French, and Spanish). Perhaps we begin to see why some want to update the spelling alphabet: there are now many other languages in the chat. It’s certainly the most commonly used spelling alphabet in the world, but it is, as most of these alphabets are, exceedingly Anglocentric. And yet, they replaced Beer with Bravo, much to the detriment of, well, the world. Other languages have come up with their own spelling alphabets. Some needed wholly new ones, such as Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. “Г as in Григо́рий” is the Russian version of “G as in Gregory.” Japanese and Mandarin Chinese both have their own letter-based alphabets (Kana and Pinyin, respectively) in addition to their traditional logographic alphabets (in which symbols stand in for whole words or phrases, rather than just sounds). I must admit, it has crossed my mind in the past to wonder how the East Asian language speakers handled such things, but never enough to actually, you know, look it up. Some languages that use the Roman alphabet, as English does, have letters of their own. Take Æ in Danish and Norwegian, which is usually given “Æ as in Ægir,” a figure from Norse mythology. And also, like, how they handled accented letters in French and Spanish, which this article mentions briefly. Voice call quality has gone down over the past two decades. Yeah, it turns out no one really wanted to make phone calls, anyway. Sure, much communication has moved over to text, email, and social platforms, but everyone still needs to talk on the phone sometimes. And the most common phrase uttered in such a phone call is "What'd you say?" Independent of their use in military and aviation capacities, we sort of need spelling alphabets now more than ever. The problem is that what we’ve been given by the 50-year-old standard is deeply flawed for modern use. Only if you care about non-Anglophones. “We know in speech perception that frequent words are much more easily heard in noise than infrequent words,” says Hazan. That why it is a pretty poor choice to use, say, “S as in Sierra” (the standard) instead of “S as in sugar.” Yeah, I don't buy it. "Sugar" is pronounced with a very nonstandard 'sh' phoneme up front; "Sierra" is not. I'd pick "Sucks," myself, but that's not going to happen. Hazan, in 2006, was asked for a BBC Radio story to see if she could come up with a better spelling alphabet. There's more at the article, but basically: Turns out there was effectively no difference between the new, improved spelling alphabet and the old standard. If certain letters were in certain places in the nonsense combination, the new version might be more effective; in other places, the old version was. No difference! After all that! Hey, at least they were tested rather than just assumed to work, like with the older alphabets. This can be partly explained because people have just grown familiar with the whole “alfa-bravo-charlie” thing. It’s in books and movies, it’s just one of those things we absorb without thinking about it. And there's just something satisfying about saying Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, even though it's twice as many syllables than the original "What the fuck?" So, no, I don't think we need to come up with a new spelling alphabet, except in terms of expanding it to allow for different language alphabets. Besides, I just recently (almost) mastered this one, and I don't want to go through the whole memorization thing again. It would be like if English were to suddenly decide to simplify its spelling: sure it would be easier going forward, but all of us who have worked to learn and deal with the idiosyncratic spellings we have now wood be todaly steemed. |
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